Skittering Surveyor Discussion

1 week ago

This comes from love, I also have a Shirei deck and hate to see people misplaying him.
Desecrated Tomb
is overrated and should be pulled out, it only triggers once per turn. A better replacement would be
Lightning Coils
which gives you more creatures and more powerful creatures. I would recommend also pulling
Liliana's Shade
, which is a four drop for a land to your hand,
Skittering Surveyor
does the same thing and is a three drop.
Soldevi Adnate
is also pretty bad, most cards with a tap ability are in this type of deck. First you would only be getting 4 mana at the most, which is fine but underutilized. My final creature suggestion is to add more heavies. Where is the win-con? Where are the super demons who destroy things?
Ob Nixilis, Unshackled
, is perfect as is
Razaketh, the Foulblooded

2 weeks ago

My immediate thought with utilizing the Bros efficiently was to emphasize artifact creatures (ex.
Goblin Replica
) and enchantment creatures (ex.
Courser of Kruphix
) so you could always have options on what to sacrifice to answer a problem. You have the creature portion covered completely but I honestly cannot see you wanting to sacrifice any of your enchantments without also hurting yourself.

4 months ago

I honestly tend to find
Bottle Gnomes
pretty relevant, as I often lose a lot of life, but I suppose I'm playing enough tutors now to where I can just grab
Zulaport Cutthroat
or something if that's really such a concern--I suppose I can cut him, though I will miss him.

I'm still kinda on edge about cutting
Black Market
--my meta is still fairly casual, but I have, in fact, won before with
Exsanguinate
thanks to all the mana from Black Market against a fairly competitive (but by no means optimized)
Prossh, Skyraider of Kher
deck (and some other peeps). I might find something else to cut for
Pitiless Plunderer
, but I'd rather not have to choose between both of them. (Also, something worth considering is that
Black Market
is harder to remove than
Pitiless Plunderer
, though they'd need exile effects or something in any case).

As for
Sanguine Bond
+
Exquisite Blood
, getting 10 mana isn't a problem for me, but I get what you're saying--it's not exactly the fastest combo available, and my deck probably doesn't slow the game down enough to make it competitively viable. All the same, there's just not that many better mono-black combos.

As for running more tutors and stax effects, well, for one, I actually still want this list to be playable in my meta (it's approaching a point where it's just too cancerous relatively to what the majority of everyone else is playing, believe it or not), so adding
Trinisphere
and
Static Orb
and the like would be very unsubtle and super cutthroat (though, yes, that's exactly what would make the deck more competitive, I understand that). Secondly, the list is getting pretty tight, yet again, so I'd probably have to cut some Shirei synergy for that sort of thing, which would probably be worth it, but would make me feel that much more soulless, honestly. Can never seem to strike that balance between not playing a whole bunch of staples and having a synergetic build...

Thirdly, while they'd absolutely be worth it, I'm not playing more tutors simply due to budget considerations. I know that might sound pretty laughable considering the deck costs $830 dollars, but it's the only list I have that I own in paper (well, most of it--waiting for more cards to arrive, as I keep cutting stuff), but I've been building it up over the course of 3-4 years. Budget is no object in cEDH, I know, but it is for me--the most expensive card in the deck is about $75. Spending $100 on a card isn't something I really want to do. I might find something to cut for
Cruel Tutor
, though (bad as it is).

(Oh, and, on a completely unrelated note, this might already be a thing, but I was wondering if anyone had figured out a way to combo out with
Timestream Navigator
in a
Prime Speaker Vannifar
list. All you'd need is a 1-drop that recurs itself to either your hand or the battlefield, and, so long as you had enough mana and the city's blessing, you could take infinite turns. That might actually be a viable combo in cEDH).

4 months ago

NoOneOfConsequence shirei is one of the best recursion engines (so if you're beating a dead horse, at least we can expect it from a Shirei player). He provides significant advantage, provided you play an efficient & synergistic gameplan.

Bottle Gnomes
is a guaranteed 3 life per turn. This does not advance your gameplan, nor does it tax your opponents. This card is cute, I'll give you that, but it's excessive.

Liliana's Shade
is 4 mana to tutor for a swamp every turn. Neat, but still it's 4 mana - unless you're going balls to the wall on 28-30 lands, I can't see how this is great for you, as it's an inefficient
Skittering Surveyor
. You have no other
Swamp
cards that I can see, therefore no reason to actually run the card in place of a more efficient version.

Black Market
is great turn by turn, but pound for pound it's worse than
Pitiless Plunderer
, as with plunderer you make mana the same turn. Black market requires you to wait an entire turn-cycle before it does anything - and in those 3 turns you're not holding up mana to respond to all of your opponent's threats - basically gambling with the hope of a payoff on your turn.

You could run, but choose not to use
Scroll Rack
, one of your best options for card advantage.

Your tutor suite seems to aim to find more pieces to your stax-engine. Have you considered running more tutors? Using
Imperial Seal
,
Grim Tutor
,

Leyline of the Void
is unavoidable in this build, as your win con is not coming out until late game, and any hulk deck will win first.

It's admirable that you've found so many creatures that synergise with shirei to hurt your opponents turn by turn. But here, a lot of these are redundant. In a stax deck you need many more ways to hurt your opponent decks. Including
Trinisphere
,
Sphere of Resistance
,
Winter Orb
, would all help your gameplan.

You could use
Praetor's Grasp
- as it's likely to find a card that will actually win you the game & it's a stax piece.

There are a lot of issues with your list - those t3 decks are usually decks that are unproven (imo). Your shirei deck still needs a lot of refinement for tier 3 to
Deem Worthy
.

I could go on about many of the other options in your Shirei build, but maybe you should re-read the comments section. I made sure to put a healthy set of options in there for you to consider several days ago.

I'd recommend doing some solid research into the cEDH meta and how cutthroat every design decision needs to be. I think there's a discord called playEDH, or look for some cEDH decks to test against. You'll find out very fast that your shirei build may be good in some metas, but in cEDH it is not enough.

A
Crucible of Worlds
& some fetch-lands would go well. That way at least you'd be able to gain mana advantage turn by turn with almost no loss.
Lastly, try running
Meteor Golem
- I've seen him be busted with
Scarecrone
and other recursion effects, but ymmv. Especially if you don't like using sorceress queen.

5 months ago

Slow down opponents' ability to cast spells, which forces opponents to keep cards in hand

Force opponents to discard, limiting their options

Use discard triggers to punish opponents

This sounds like it can work with Bolas. The risk I'd point out is with the discard punishers, specifically ones like Megrim and Liliana's Caress. They can be a little fragile - once the opponent no longer has any cards, you stop getting triggers. They're nice incidental damage and can add up, but you can't rely on them to actually close out the game. Bolas is also not ideally suited to the stax plan - he doesn't inherently break symmetry, so there are much better options for hard stax.

Your MVP cards in a discard-based strategy are going to be Geth's Grimoire and Waste Not, with Notion Thief as a runner-up. You're playing a control game, and control requires keeping your hand full.

Wheels that discard are going to be excellent for you, getting a ton of discard triggers. Ignore wheels that shuffle and then draw without discarding.

For the stax package - Back to Basics is going to be your best target. Use it with Frozen AEther so that all opponents' lands enter tapped, and Basics can keep them tapped down.

Back to Basics doesn;t stop you from using your own fetches (even budget slow-fetches) since you only use those once - they don;t need to untap. Blood Moon works, and it sets your nonbasics to one of your actual colors, but it also turns all your fetches into Mountains. Watch out for that.

I'd also look at Ruination. It's MLD...but it only blows up non-basic lands. It's exactly what you're doing with the enchantments, but with removal.

You already seem to know the mana rock drill from your Nekusar deck. You want to lean heavily on the mana rocks - all of the 2CMC signets/talismans/Fellwar Stone. Fellwar is going to get much less useful once you land Bloood Moon though. Star Compass is useful since you'll be loading heavily on basic lands. Coldsteel Heart is useful to plug a specific color hole. Obviously Sol Ring. You're going to be looking for color fixing more than anything, so Chromatic Lantern is worth the extra mana, and any Mox you can afford are worthwhile (except Mox Amber, that one's less useful).

Blood Moon and Back to Basics are great, but they likely are not enough to consistently slow opponents enough to be wroth all of this workaround by themselves. Even Ruination doesn't add enough. Unfortunately Grixis doesn;t have any of the neat land-untap triggers like Nature's Will or Seedborn Muse - if it did, you could abuse things like Stasis and Rising Waters and Static Orb more easily. Still, you could support Winter Orb with enough mana rocks. Be sure to run good one-sided artifact removal like Vandalblast to keep opponents from using their own rocks.

And of course Omniscience can let you blow up all the artifacts and lands and still play what you want. You'll be running a ton of rocks anyway, which could ramp you into it fairly early.

The big thing, though, is how you want to win. Stax doesn;t work super well on its own - you need to be using stax to slow your opponents down so that you can pull off your own win condition. Do you have any ideas on how youd like to win, even if just generally? Combat, combos, punisher effects like Megrim, mill, etc?

Skittering Surveyor occurrence in decks from the last year

Commander / EDH:

All decks: 0.01%

Magic the Gathering, FNM is TM and copyright Wizards of the Coast, Inc, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This site is unaffiliated. Articles and comments are user-submitted and do not represent official endorsements of this site.